Zeitz MOCAA

The Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art (MOCAA) occupies the hulk of a grain silo building on the East Quay which, when built in 1924, was the tallest building in sub-Saharan Africa. 

The stripping of the magnolia paint on the silo building, applied in the 1980s, has revealed a dazzling concrete shell pockmarked and scarred by its 90-year history. Within, the silos’ innards have been excavated to create an atrium. The fragile original concrete was sheathed in new structural concrete sleeves, then cut by hand with a combination of power cutters and diamond rope saws which sliced through the silos’ concrete skin.

The museum’s ground floor entrance is under a reconstructed steel saw-tooth shed. It winds around the central atrium and includes the ticket desk and shop. The galleries – two floors of temporary exhibition space above two floors of permanent collection displays – have been inserted into the windowless cavities on either side of the atrium, and are accessed via a utilitarian steel spiral stair or glass cylindrical lifts which shoot up and down the shafts of the partially cut-away silos.

To connect the two major parts of the complex – a 33m-tall storage annexe consisting of 42 vertical concrete tubes and a 58m-tall grain elevator tower – the project team carved out a central atrium from the silo’s cellular structure. The sleeved tubes together formed a gigantic arch spanning the future atrium space and provided a cutting guide for removing portions of the old silos with hand-held double disk saws.